What is a Sad Commentary on Our Time?
by licensed television critic Farrell ChildeAs salesmen of encyclopedias know, the public is inclined to be in awe of knowledge but to distrust intelligence.– Colin Watson, Snobbery with ViolenceOne of the great successes of television is the game show Jeopardy, which has been on the air for about thirty of the last thirty-eight years. It has had three runs, its current one being the longest at eighteen years.
The show is syndicated and widely programmed as part of a double Monday-Friday game show strip with another game show created by Merv Griffin, Wheel of Fortune. There are no flies on Mr. Griffin, as you know.
The idea of Jeopardy is to provide three contestants with the answers to unspecified questions, after which the contestants try to be the first to provide a question that the answer is an answer to. Each answer has a monetary value, which varies, and the first contestant to come up with a question for it gets the money.
The real question, of course, is why anybody watches. I can understand why people watch Wheel of Fortune – it has a witty host, it has an attractive and personable assistant who is on screen a lot, it has bright colours, it has bells, it has expensive prizes strewn around the set, and most important of all it has a Big Wheel. Jeopardy has none of that.
Furthermore, the Jeopardy studio audience never makes a spontaneous peep, the winners never show any excitement or satisfaction, and the host talks like a maître d'. Why do people watch?
The essence of the answer to that question can be inferred from the quotation at the start of this article. We spend much of the first quarter or so of our lives being force-fed information that we need to know, or at least that some educator thinks we need to know, in our later lives. The more we can show we know, the more we are rewarded. Is it any surprise that when we reach our later lives we discover in ourselves a high regard for the knowledgeable, even if their knowledge is of trivia of the type that Jeopardy often deals with? Knowledge of any kind seems gravely important to us, so not only do we watch Jeopardy or even compete on it, we watch and compete on it it gravely.
Similarly, we (by whom I mean we Western types) love to collect things. We collect stamps, coins, paintings, CDs, china, string, and thousands of other things, including pieces of what we fondly consider to be information. It isn't surprising that we like to see people square off to see whose collection is the biggest. And again we show our respect for the gravity of the contest by remaining stern and solemn.
Finally, our reverence for displays of knowledge is enhanced by the great ignorance which characterizes the citizens of the great democracies. For example, a poll conducted by CNN and USA Today in 2002 found that 24% of the Americans they polled said they didn't know who their Secretary of the Treasury was. A poll conducted in 2002 by CNN and Time found that 28% of the Americans they polled weren't familiar with their Secretary of Defence. In the same year CBS News and the New York Times conducted three polls which found 47% to 52% of the Americans they polled reporting that they were too unfamiliar with the Attorney General to comment on his job performance.
Not that we Canadians are any better. A poll conducted in 2002 by Ipsos Reid found that only half the Canadians they polled could name the first prime minister of Canada and that only a fifth could name the first French-speaking prime minister. Another Ipsos Reid poll conducted in 2002 found that only a third of the Canadians they polled could name the country's greatest military victory, the battle of Vimy Ridge (and as we know, the minister of defence is a little shaky on that one, too).
The encyclopedic knowledge displayed by many Jeopardy contestants must seem superhuman to a large part of the show's audience. They, like the audience, are left speechless in admiration.
The original host of Jeopardy, Art Fleming, was much less reverent in his approach than is the current host, Alex Trebek. That fits with our theory, since people are probably more ignorant today than they were back in 1964 when the show started – hell, there's so much more to be ignorant of. Then we had the Soviet Union, now we have Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Tadzhikistan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Georgia, and on and on and on. The feats of the contestants seemed less awe-inspiring in Mr. Fleming's day, so he didn't have to show as much respect for them as Mr. Trebek does.
And I still don't get it. To my mind, ideally you would know only what you needed to know. You wouldn't be cluttering up your brain with trivia like the names of the performers of every Top 40 hit of the 1960s, as I have. Of course, what the average citizen needs to know is probably far more than he or she actually does know, and in fact probably far more than what he or she thinks he or she knows. If I thought that Jeopardy was encouraging people to learn things they needed to know I'd say it was performing an important public service. However, I'm sure most viewers respond to the displays of knowledge on Jeopardy the way they respond to a performance by trained dogs – they're entertained by trained dogs but they don't intend to train their own dogs to do the same tricks.
For a more wholesome game show experience, try The Price is Right. There's a show on which people actually have to think. In Southern Ontario it's now running opposite Jeopardy in the evenings, so I know what I'll be watching.
What is a Sad Commentary on Our Time? © Coolth, 2002
January 2, 2003
